Advice from the Masters: E.L. Doctorow (In Memoriam)

E.L. Doctorow published novels, short stories, essays, and a bunch of other things, but he’s best known for the novels. They’re not historical novels, per se, but they mix historical characters into the fiction. Or maybe they mix fiction into the history. You can decide for yourself.

The best of those novels, Ragtime, was turned into a film and a musical. The Modern Library editorial board chose it as one of the top novels of the Twentieth Century.

“E. L. Doctorow, a leading figure in contemporary American letters whose popular, critically admired and award-winning novels — including ‘Ragtime,’ ‘Billy Bathgate’ and ‘The March’ — situated fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts, among identifiable historical figures and often within unconventional narrative forms, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, N.Y.”

“Few minds were as playful and as serious as E.L. Doctorow’s. Conjurer of old-time gangsters and ragtime stars. Commentator on wars and presidents and the laws of the land. Student of political and literary history and how they tell us who we are now. Doctorow, who died Tuesday at age 84, was the rare American writer to move gracefully between lives as engaged citizen and solitary inventor.”